The Next 50

Make no small plans

50 already? It seems only a blink of an eye since I wrote Apple at 40. Let’s try copy & paste.

In Apple’s first 40 50 years it shipped 1,591,092,250 5,126,211,000 computers1.

This shipment total is higher than any other computer company in its first 40 50 years. Actually there are no other PC makers that are 40 50 years old. One computer maker (IBM) is older but they only sold PCs for 24 years and what they still sell they don’t sell in high numbers.

That does not make Apple the top seller in a given year. Looking at only the Mac, Apple’s traditional form factor personal computer, Apple is fifth fourth in market share. If including the iPad, it was the top computer vendor in 2011 and, including the iPhone, it was first in 2009.

The following graph shows the top computer makers by units sold since 1975, a year before Apple was founded. (Click on the graph to see a higher resolution.)

Note that the graph is log scale and in multiples of 1000. Following the yellow Apple line we can see how it started with fewer than 1000 units shipped in its first year to today when it is shipping more than 1 million computers every day2. It’s also quite remarkable to count how many other companies have come and gone in this top five list and imagine how many came and went in the “other” category.

Who remembers Atari, Commodore, Packard Bell, Compaq? Few said that they were doomed while they were in the running. Going back to Apple at 40,

After having a 40 50 year run and after selling more computers than all American and Japanese computer companies put together, how should we think about the next 40 50 years?

First, clearly Apple shifted from being a “computer company”. It has already changed its name to exclude the word “Computer.” That [came to mean that] it sells devices (which happen to also include computers.) We don’t use computers to compute anyway. We use them to make decisions, keep track of things, speed things up and to communicate and to entertain.

After convincing the world that it’s a not just a computer company, the next challenge has been to convince the world that it’s also not just a product company. It did so by launching Services as a group (formerly known as iTunes Software and Services) and then separating the financial reporting so that Services can be measured with its own gross margin. Year after year management emphasized Services growth in its commentary. Services has grown into the second largest segment, 26% of total revenues ($112.8 billion out of 435.6 billion in calendar 2025.)

Services, if it stood alone, would be number 40 in the Fortune 500 list of largest companies by sales. It has been impossible to ignore it. Considering how much customers actually spend on Apps, Content and Services, the total is even bigger at $240 billion last year3. As a result, some, perhaps most, recognize Apple as a Products & Services company.

The App store alone attracts $169 billion in spending per year (2025) and that is now 5x what theatrical movie sales bring in world-wide.4

So if Apple is today at least a bundle of Products and Services then what will Apple be 50 years from now?

Again from Apple 40:

My simple proposal is to think of Apple as a customer creator. It creates and maintains customers. The more it creates, the more it prospers. The more customers it preserves the more it’s likely to persevere. This measure of performance for a company is not easy to obtain. It’s not a line item in any financial report.

The closest figure we have is that today Apple has one 2.5 billion active devices in use. It has around 1.1 billion users 5. Using the devices as a proxy, we can say that this audience has more than doubled in the last decade.

So we know that at least Apple has created a large number of customers. Knowing total devices sold and number in use means that we can be sure that 63% of all the computers Apple sold are still in use. This means that most customers are recent customers. Are they going to come back?

If we then factor in the size and persistence of Apple’s audience (customer base) we might conclude that there are factors which will allow it to grow rather than shrink. My analysis based on public data shows that the customer base has been increasing steadily.

And here is a graph showing the size of device base and implications for subscriptions. services and comparisons with other consumer aggregators. Note the forward looking nature of a linear extrapolation of the historical data.

10 years ago, I continued:

Combining the history of customer creation and customer preservation with the value obtained from each customer implies that the next 40 years will be about creating another large tranche of customers whose willingness to spend on whatever Apple creates will be relatively unchanged.

We don’t know the limit. One billion was hard to imagine even one year ago. We might see two billion devices in short order. Perhaps not. Perhaps as we have a multitude of devices about us all day the number will become less meaningful. But if the number of middle class customers grows and as Apple keeps its products within their reach, there is no reason to think that there will be a reversal of the last 40 years in terms of customer acquisition.

This analysis contradicts the current perception of the company as reflected by its stock price. That price assumes the audience will wither ((With a P/E ratio of 11, without a change in revenue per user, the only justification would be the audience shrinking by more than 90% over the next 20 years.)) That is not insanity. It is what we could expect if Apple were unexceptional.

We did see 2 billion. We actually saw 2.5 billion. The assumption of a company in distress as reflected by the P/E ratio of 11 is gone. It’s safe to say that Apple is exceptional.

But note that we are only 10 years into that 40 year forecast from a decade ago. Do we still feel confident that the company can last 30 more years given what we’ve seen so far? If one company could get through the next 30 I would say it is Apple. And if it is so then I think it will get through the next 50.

One more Thing

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